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U.S officials now say the killer is the mastermind behind 9/11. But, says the reporter Pearl was staying with, certain American allies need to be investigated as well.
Oct 22, 2003 | Last Thursday, a senior White House official called Mariane Pearl and Paul Steiger, the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, to report a new, key development in the investigation into the death of Mariane's husband, Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. "We have now established enough links and credible evidence to think that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed" -- the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks -- "was involved in your husband's murder," the official told Mariane.
"What do you mean 'involved'?" Mariane asked.
"We think he committed the actual murder."
To those following the case closely, this is not a huge surprise. "We've known all along that al-Qaida was involved," Mariane told me Wednesday. "We just didn't know how." After initial relief at having Mohammed's involvement confirmed, her reaction shifted back to impatience at the slow pace of unraveling the ties between the shadowy figures responsible for Danny's kidnapping and murder. "We have worked so hard to find the truth," Mariane says. "We have to continue."
My interest in the investigation is more than a professional one. At the time Danny was kidnapped, he and Mariane, then pregnant with their first child, were staying with me at a house I had rented in Karachi, Pakistan, while writing a book. I had traveled to Pakistan for Salon, to cover the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, and was happy to host the Pearls when Danny came to Karachi to interview a local Muslim cleric who was said to have ties to alleged "shoe-bomber" Richard Reid. He was pursuing other investigative threads, as well. When he didn't return from the interview on Jan. 23, 2002, Mariane and I alerted U.S. officials and his Wall Street Journal editors, from the desk where Danny had left his laptop. We transformed my home into the investigation's headquarters. For five weeks, we worked closely with U.S. and Pakistani investigators to find Danny; after investigators discovered he had been murdered, I left Pakistan, and moved to Paris to welcome Danny's son, Adam, into the world, and later returned to the United States. I have remained close friends with Mariane, and have helped her follow the investigative threads in the case, talking with investigators and gathering information.
The confirmation of Mohammed's involvement, make no mistake, is a serious breakthrough. According to American officials, Mohammed was one of three Arab men known to have arrived with video equipment and knives at the location where Pearl was held after his abduction in Karachi that day. We all know what followed: They videotaped him answering questions about his Jewish ancestry as he kept his composure, showing his classic irreverence for authority. A final image of the video showed him having his throat cut.
Mohammed's bleary-eyed image was splashed across newspapers worldwide after he was captured by U.S. and Pakistani intelligence agents this past March. Although American officials first denied that Mohammed had anything to do with Pearl's killing, this week they confirmed that they now believe he was responsible. But that revelation raises more questions than it answers. The full investigation into Danny's death could well proceed in directions that will make both Pakistan and U.S. investigators uncomfortable.
Until now, Omar Saeed Sheikh, the young Pakistani London School of Economics dropout who was sentenced to death in July 2002 for organizing the Pearl kidnapping, had been identified as the ringleader of a carefully assembled alliance of extremist Muslim militants working in at least four different terrorist cells. Mohammed would link Omar Sheikh more explicitly to the wider and more sinister al-Qaida network. The question, though, is whether this will lead to an even more troubling connection: between al-Qaida and Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, which has been linked to Omar Sheikh.
As Mariane says, "When the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed name first came up, the obvious questions were what was his link to Omar Sheikh and what was his link to ISI? Those are the questions we have to answer now, and there are more. What is the direct link between Omar Sheikh and 9/11? Is Omar Sheikh a main player in 9/11? Should there be more charges against him? How much was al-Qaida involved in planning Danny's kidnapping? What was the role of Saudi Arabia?"
Pakistan's possible link to terrorism is already an extremely volatile subject. Pakistan, struggling to maintain its position as an ally of the U.S., bristles at any suggestion that the Pearl kidnappers had relations with the ISI. The allegation by French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy that Sheikh was an ISI agent, contained in his book "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?" sparked a harsh rebuke from Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf last month. "ISI involvement in the killing of this young man is unthinkable," the president insisted.
But of course it is quite thinkable, because of the shadowy way the ISI operates. Musharraf himself struggles constantly against the former generals who run the intelligence arm, which has historically maintained close relations with many of the country's rogue terrorist groups, and seems to operate independently of the president's authority. U.S. officials, because of their own need for a close ally in Musharraf, also struggle to hide their frustrations with his unruly intelligence arm. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, during a meeting a few weeks ago with members of Congress, implied as much when he said he did not believe "affection for working with us extends up and down the rank and file of the Pakistani security community."
And no one symbolizes the ISI's shadowy relationship with terrorist operatives better than Omar Sheikh.
A judge in an anti-terrorism court in Pakistan sentenced Sheikh to death for his role as the ringleader in Danny's kidnapping and murder last July. An appeal has been pending ever since with countless postponements. Throughout his trial last year, Omar Sheikh maintained that -- although he knew how, and by whom, Danny had been killed -- he was not himself responsible. The judge sentenced three other young Pakistani men to life sentences for their roles in facilitating the kidnapping and disseminating hostage letters, including digital photographs of Danny in captivity, via the Internet.
When Pakistani police investigators traced the kidnapping plot to Sheikh on Feb. 5, 2002, Sheikh reportedly turned himself in to the custody of a former ISI official, who was then home secretary of the state of Punjab, based in Lahore, where Sheikh's family lived. He remained in the protection of intelligence agents for one week, until Feb. 12, when he was handed over to Pakistani police. But his connections to the ISI didn't begin or end there.
Sheikh was arrested in 1994 in New Delhi, India, for kidnapping American and British tourists, and was imprisoned pending trial in India's maximum-security Tihar Prison. But Sheikh, a British national of Pakistani origin, was one of three militants horse-traded for the hostages of an Indian airline hijacked to Afghanistan in December 1999, by the terrorist group he previously belonged to, Harkat-ul-Ansar. The Indian government released Sheikh to Afghanistan. From there, and reportedly under ISI protection, he went back to Pakistan before returning to London to reunite with his family. He remained involved in the activities of militant Muslim groups in Pakistan, but stayed out of the news until his arrest for Danny's kidnapping and murder. Sheikh laid the trap for Danny in Karachi, but left for Lahore before the actual abduction, by all accounts. It isn't clear if Khalid Sheikh Mohammad was in the loop by then.
